The Ballad of Tom Dooley (18 page)

One time Ann almost caught me, though, for I had just opened my mouth to tell her a new tale about Tom Dula’s visit a-courting Laura, when Ann interrupted me to say that Tom had spent yester evening with her and James Melton. Hearing her out gave me time to think up a new piece of news, so when she drew breath, I told her that Laura had wept and raged for want of seeing her sweetheart last night. I got out of that predicament all right, but it was a near thing, and I thought to myself that in future I’d best wait and hear Ann’s news before I delivered any more of mine.

It worried me that Tom had been here while I was gone. “Did he say anything about Laura?” I asked Ann, trying not to sound overly concerned about it.

She shook her head. “He never says two words about her. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he didn’t give two hoots about her.”

“He’s trying to throw you off the scent, Ann. He knows there’ll be trouble if you find out how things are between him and Laura.”

She shrugged. “I don’t like it, but I don’t reckon it matters. Remember I told you about that Caroline Barnes what he courted a while back? That blew over, and this will, too. He’ll always be at my beck and call. Always.”

I went back to kneading biscuit dough then, and thinking on how I could use that.

Every now and again, Tom really would show up at Wilson Foster’s place, and then I’d breathe a sigh of relief, because it meant I could have some real conversations to recite to Ann instead of having to conjure everything up out of my head on the cold walk back. Mostly, though, even when he did come, I’d have to improve on that, too, for there wasn’t much between Tom and Laura that I could see. He didn’t look calf’s eyes at her or sweet-talk her like courting fellows generally do. Seemed to me like he’d as lief talk to her brothers as her.

Most times of an evening, when he did show up in German’s Hill, Tom would slink in like a stray dog, flashing a smile to whoever caught his eye, and if he was invited to take supper, he’d pull up a chair between the boys, and tuck in with the rest of them, talking farming or hunting, or whatever anybody had a mind to run on about. Oh, he’d wink at Laura now and again, especially when he wanted biscuits or taters sent his way, but then Tom always winked at the ladies. I’d seen him do it to fat, gray widows twice his age at a social, and he didn’t mean nothing at all by it. Maybe it made him feel important to watch old ladies giggle and blush when he showed them a penny’s worth of his sunshine. He even tried it with me a time or two, but I just looked at him like he was something I’d have to scrape off my shoe, so he quit trying to dazzle me. Tom Dula didn’t have one single thing that I wanted, except that it was in his power to hurt Ann Melton, and for that alone I tolerated his society.

He didn’t seem to affect Laura much, either, with his smiles. Maybe her head was already too full of thoughts about her other lover, but truly I think that Tom’s charm mostly worked on fat old ladies that he wouldn’t have looked at twice, for real feelings. He was a handsome boy, and not much man about him, for all that he had been in the War. I think marrying-age women have to be more practical about who they take an interest in, but those dried-up old sticks who sat out the settlement socials gossiping in corners—why, they just beamed on Tom Dula as if he was a brand-new speckled pup. They didn’t mean anything by it, either, I reckon. Maybe he was just a pretty child to the likes of them. But child-bearing women had too many real babies underfoot to bother about a handsome boy, who wouldn’t work or settle down.

Once at a social when Tom’s name came up in conversation, one of the younger women said, “Tom Dula? Why, he’d be like having a blood racehorse on a tenant farm—nice enough to show off, but useless for everyday.” And all the other ladies around her nodded in agreement.

The exception to that was Ann. Ann never would hear a word against him, and for his part, no matter what other dalliances he might get up to, it seemed like he never changed toward her, either. I think if there is such a thing as love, which I don’t altogether believe, then what Tom felt for Ann was real, and the rest was just a way of making his life easier by giving people what they wanted, as long as it didn’t cost him nothing. He would take anything pleasant that was foisted upon him—sex with a likely young girl was the same as a piece of pie to him, as far as I could see—but it meant no more than that to him, either.

I had to be careful carrying tales to Ann about Tom Dula. I didn’t want to make her so mad that she’d light in to Tom when next he came around. I wanted her simmering mad, but not aflame. Anger muddies up people’s minds, so that they don’t think clearly and they act too fast, without counting the cost of what they’ve done. I am blessed not to have that affliction. Nothing shakes me inside. When people pour their boiling anger over my head, I just get colder and slower inside, like a bear in a winter cave, and let them rage, while all the while I am thinking how I will hurt them down the road, when they have even forgotten how they treated me. I never forget anything.

*   *   *

So we lived through that first winter since the end of the War, and though folk said it was a mercy not to have to hear about any more men dying, and not having shortages from the blockades and the armies attacking the railroads, things still weren’t altogether peaceful again. There were bushwhackers still at large, attacking travelers on the roads or robbing isolated farms. We didn’t worry about them overmuch, since there wasn’t anything any of us had for them to take, but it was a reminder that times were hard, and likely to stay that way for a good while yet.

Most of the time, even if the devil himself had been riding roughshod through the Yadkin Valley, I would have been too tired to care, for me and James Melton and those two sorry milk cows had every foot of the farm to plow and seed, and at the end of the day in the fields, we all had other work to do, besides, even the cows. It was hard lines on all of us, I figured, to have to work two jobs—me in the fields and doing the house chores besides, and James Melton making shoes of an evening, when he was so tired, he’d fall asleep in his chair and pitch forward until he woke himself up, and then he would yawn and stretch, and go back to sewing leather again.

Ann didn’t change with the seasons. She still lay abed as long as she could, swallowed in quilts, and she took no more notice of the farm in spring than she had in winter. Some of that might be to my credit, though, for I had given her other things to think about. If Laura Foster’s dark lover was really going to carry her off, it would be soon.

I didn’t think about the three of them all the time. I had my chores, and my doctor visits, and a jug of whiskey when I could get it, and the company of the fools in the settlement and now and then a man, when I felt the urge, but all the time in the back of my head, like crickets chirping in a nighttime field, my mind kept clicking along on ways to get back at Ann and Tom. I didn’t always heed those thoughts, any more than you listen to the crickets, except when everything is still, and you are not busy with chores—but they are there whether you heed them or not. Always there. I thought May would drag on forever, and though the weather was fair, I itched with impatience for something to happen—and finally it did.

One afternoon, when James Melton had gone off to buy salt or nails—I forget which; doesn’t matter—Tom had stopped over to the house, and he and Ann were making sheep’s eyes at one another. I could tell they wanted to be alone, so I made myself look busy in the cabin so’s I could spoil their dalliance.

Finally, bold as brass, Ann says to me, “Why don’t you leave off sweeping, Pauline, and go over to the Fosters’ for a spell?”

I smiled to myself. I wasn’t to be got rid of as easy as that. “Why, I would. But coming home in the dark is a perilous journey.”

She looked at Tom and they both smiled. “Why, Pauline, what would bushwhackers want with you?” asked Tom, giving me that wink, like he always does when he thinks he is charming some silly old biddy.

I shrugged. “It ain’t that. It’s the darkness. The brush and briars is awful grown up along the way, and the ground is so uneven, that I’m afraid I’ll trip and fall in the night and break my neck.”

I could tell it would be nothing to them if I did, but Ann could hardly force me to go unless she gave the problem a lick and a promise, to humor me. She turned to Tom. “She’s right about the path. It could use some tending to, and it ain’t like you got anything better to do, Tom. Why don’t you go borrow my mama’s mattock, and see can you smooth it out some?”

Tom yawned and stretch. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said, only considering doing it at all to please Ann. I could fall down a well for all he cared.

By then I had decided that anything was better than standing around watching the two of them paw at one another, so I put away the broom in the corner, and said I would go anyhow, but that if I broke my neck coming back from German’s Hill in the dark, it would be on their heads. They just laughed and told me to be off, and I reckon they forgot about me altogether two heartbeats after I shut the door behind me.

*   *   *

I didn’t really have anything fancy worked out in my head. When it comes to making people do things, it’s like chasing chickens in the barnyard—you never know which way they’re going to run. Sometimes, though, I test folk in little ways to see if I can make them run the way I want them to. So most of what happened just happened. All I did was flap my apron at them to begin with, so to speak, and the rest just followed naturally.

I was a good half mile from Wilson Foster’s place when Laura came running toward me, so I stopped, and when she got near enough for me to see the grin on her face, I knew she was big with news.

“He’s wanting to go, Pauline!” she said, giving me a hug out of pure rapture, and I stood as still as I could and did not shudder.

Her sallow skin was pink with excitement and she must have brushed her hair a hundred times that afternoon, because it was shiny and smooth, tied up at the nape of her neck with a scrap of frayed pink ribbon. She had on her homemade calico under an apron, though, so I knew that whatever was going to happen wasn’t happening now. She wasn’t ready yet.

I mustered up a smile. “Well, of course he is, Laura. From the way you talked, there was never a doubt in my mind that he’d keep his word to you.” Mostly it’s easy to tell people what they want to hear. You just figure out what you really think and then say the opposite. “Just one thing though.…”

“What’s that?”

“Well, Tom Dula has caught the pox, you know, and he is going around saying he got it from you. So I reckon either way, you are afflicted same as him. I wondered if you have told your intended about that?”

Laura’s smile drained away, and she scuffed her shoe in the dirt. James Melton had made her those shoes, and I wondered what he would say about how she kept them. “Well, I have seen Dr. Carter for it, and he is giving me physic. But as for Johnny … I ain’t been able to bring myself to tell him yet, Pauline. I don’t know how he’d take it. And of course I don’t reckon he knows about me and Tom, neither. I just want to get gone from here so bad, that I dare not take a chance on scaring him off.” She clutched at my sleeve. “You won’t tell him, will you, Pauline? Swear?”

I laughed and jerked my sleeve free of her bony fingers. “Why, laws, Cousin, I never even set eyes on the man except from a distance when he’s working outside. What would I go telling him for? I told you I was happy to see you get away from tending to all those young’uns. You can trust me.”

At that she hugged me again, and I stood it as best I could. “Oh, Pauline, you are the best friend I have! I knew you’d not let me down.” Those muddy eyes of hers were fair dancing with excitement. “I’m just going off now to see my Johnny. I can’t let him come to the house, of course. Daddy seen me talking to him one time, and I thought he was going to take a switch to me, but I swore to him there warn’t nothing in it. But you could come with me and meet him, Pauline. Then I could say I’d been off with you. Maybe we could bring back wild onions or a mess of salad greens for supper, and say that’s why we went.”

I nodded, and kept my smile plastered on. That was the first sensible thing I had ever heard said about Wilson Foster. But to go and see John Anderson would take me right back to the Meltons’ place, and I had no mind to walk an extra ten miles just to accommodate her, so I said, “I’ll keep my eyes skinned for wild greens as we go along then, but I’ll not come back with you once we get back to Reedy Branch, I’ll just go back up to Ann’s place and start supper there.”

I was kinda anxious to meet Laura’s nut brown boy. I reckoned he’d be more interesting than the sorry old farmers around Elkville, but we never did get all the way to the Andersons’ farm. Maybe he knew she was coming, though she had not said so. For all of Laura’s hugs and honeyed words about what a boon companion I was to her, I knew that she had got in the habit of lying to keep folks from finding out about her lover. And she had not told him about having the pox, which is a silent lie. So I had no cause to think that she would be entirely truthful with me, for all her fine sentiments of friendship. Perhaps she was not such a fool as I took her for, which was just as well for her lover, for she could get him killed quick enough. I might have told on the pair of them just to see the fur fly amongst those dull farmers in Elkville, but for the fact that I had other mischief in mind.

Anyhow we never reached Reedy Branch together, for before we had gone more than three miles, at a place where the road was bounded on either side by woods, a voice called out to us, and Laura clutched my arm and motioned for me to stop. I peered into the woods, trying to catch sight of a figure among the trees, but it was late in the day and the shadows lay deep in the pines.

A moment or so later, I heard a whistle from the woods, and before I could utter a word of caution, Laura had left the trace, and was hurrying toward the thicket, with her skirt hitched up to her shins, the better to run. I muttered a foul word under my breath, and set off after her.